Each year gives new high powered portable devices or “smart devices”, such as cell phones, tablet computers, netbooks, notebooks, laptop computers, e-readers, gaming devices, and the like. Almost without fail, each successive device generation has increased features, processing power, battery life, and communication options. Devices we call a cell phone today have the processing power of high-end dedicated servers from not too many years ago. And of particular interest, society is fast approaching (and some would say we have already arrived) at a state of pervasive computing, where a substantial percentage of a population has at least one smart device capable of interacting with other people's smart devices and business devices.
While there currently exist various for-a-fee business models allowing for device sharing, such as the concept of a town phone where one party acquires a phone from a communication company and resells use of the phone to townspeople, or kiosks and storefronts providing access to, for example, telephones, photocopiers, computers, the Internet, photo printing, etc., these business models require a consumer to stop to register for services, pay a fee (e.g., by providing credit card or other charge-back data), and access as proscribed by the service vendor. And even though such an arrangement can be considered ad-hoc in the sense that a traveler may just wander into range of, say an airport kiosk and its services, the service provider is not ad hoc, and is instead a pre-established vendor with associated services with manual charge systems, such as charging to a provided credit card or other charge back data.
With the pervasive access to high powered smart devices, however, we are provided with a unique opportunity for innovative ah-hoc peer to peer interactions, e.g., structured, ad-hoc, and other types of collaborative scenarios, in cooperative networks and pervasive computing environments.